This week, we discuss reflections from this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting and the latest advances in plasma chemistry with Rebecca Trager and Mason Wakley.

The annual meeting of the AAAS kicked off in Phoenix, on the heels of the recent minibus spending package announcement, as well as the rescinding of the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding. We'll fill you in on some of the conversations that took place that weekend.

And, plasma is often described as the fourth state of matter, but what exactly is it made of? We'll explain it's make-up and dive into how chemists are learning to unlock its power.

This week, we discuss the new deep learning model AlphaGenome and visit the very beginning of life on Earth with Mason Wakley and Neil Withers.

Google DeepMind has released a new deep learning model that can predict the effect of small changes to DNA sequences up to one million base pairs in length. What does this new tech mean for our understanding of the human genome?

And, how did life start on Earth, before the first cell came to be? We discuss the RNA world hypothesis and breakdown the chemistry it's built on.

This week, we discuss new butyllithium formulations and ancient limescale chemistry with Emma Pewsey and Phillip Broadwith. New bench-stable tert- and n-butyllithium formulations developed by Merck KGaA, should make organometallic chemistry safer and more accessible. What's different about these formulations and how do they work? And a team based in Germany have managed to reconstruct the history of water sources used in Pompeii from an unlikely source: limescale. We discuss the findings and what chemistry can tell us about our past.